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Michael Gerson: Iraq must be saved from extremists

The debate over who lost Iraq is tempting, emotionally satisfying and even, in some cases, historically instructive. But it is not the focus of serious foreign policy thinkers and former government officials I’ve encountered over the last few days. Their general response is not recrimination; it is fear. Particular, reasoned, fully justified fear.

Iraq threatens to become a mirror of Syria, with Iran supporting a proxy Shiite army and the Gulf states siding with Sunni Islamists who will fight against Shiite-Iranian dominance of the region. Some experts talk of the “de facto partition” of Iraq into Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite zones. This may apply to the self-sufficient Kurds. It is a rather bland description of an endless, bloody civil war between Sunni and Shiite Iraqis, both determined to rule the entire country.

If Syria is any indication, the result will be mass atrocities, mass refugee movements, massive humanitarian needs and the loss of a generation of young people to dreams of revenge. But there is another outcome, more urgently related to American security: The establishment of a dangerous, lavishly funded terrorist movement (ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), in territorial safe havens across two countries, under a leader (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi) with ambitions to be the next Osama bin Laden, served by jihadists from countries around the world.

This is a foreign policy crisis in which the most disastrous outcomes are the most likely outcomes. And the proper response to such urgent national problems, after a deep breath, is to belay the partisanship, and support (not uncritically, but genuinely) President Obama and his foreign policy team in some very difficult tasks.

In no particular order, the U.S. needs to:

■ Aid the emergence of a more inclusive and trusted Iraqi government, so that the entity we support is not a Shiite rump state.

■ Get the Kurds, who are gaining in autonomy (and territory and resources), to avoid declaring themselves autonomous and to strengthen the central government.

■ Engage the Sunni tribes with the goal of peeling off current ISIS allies of convenience.

■ Urge the region’s Sunni states to support an Iraqi unity government in its fight against terrorist groups that are eventually a threat to those states as well.

■ Inform the Iranians that America will be taking the lead in strengthening a more inclusive Iraqi government. Warn them against supporting Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and a Shiite army as a proxy force, which would harden sectarian divisions. Persuade them they do not ultimately benefit from continual, regional civil war.

■ Pursue an effective military approach that restores our intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities in Iraq (as Obama has apparently begun to do); conducts a vigorous counterterrorism campaign against ISIS; and eventually helps a unity government return to the offensive.

This range of responses is not, as they say, rocket science; it is much harder than that. Even if the administration took all these suggestions, and lots of better ones, it might not work.

But we can’t give up on the possibility of a stable, whole Iraq, however distant it currently seems. The causal concession of “partition” is to concede a source of continual threat and potential disaster. A terrorist haven reaching from the outskirts of Aleppo to the outskirts of Baghdad, with the pretentions of a caliphate and the resources of a government, run (at least in part) by Baghdadi, would be a direct threat to London, Berlin, New York and Washington.